The recently much touted alternative energy-only bill would not cost fossil industries, but instead would cost taxpayers $13.9 billion a year,according to the CBO a score that has been gathering dust since September.
Not only is this bill touted by the -NYT, the WSJ, and NPR- the fossil energy industry as the only likely bill to pass - it's failing grade from the CBO has received no publicity at all. I simply can't imagine why, can you?
The bill would authorize a total of $48.6 billion over the first three years. It would add $13.5 billion each year to the deficit.
Renewable energy would share $10.4 billion of the $48 billion with electricity supply and electricity delivery funding (or a little over $3 billion a year for renewable energy). Nuclear energy would get $5.2 billion a year, and $5.5 billion a year would go to fossil energy. The remaining $27 billion would be allocated to science programs.
The bill has no self-funding mechanism.
By contrast, revenues created by the cap and trade component in the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act CEJAPA would actually fund its renewable energy component, and leave some extra ($21 Billion a year) according to the Congressional Budget Office scoring in December.
BTW - when Senator Inhofe stormed out of the Senate Environment Committee, forcing Senator Boxer to simply bypass Republicans, he and all the Republicans who stormed out already must have known the two scores.
The Energy Only bill corporate media is trying to make us to settle for, was already marked as a CBO failure in September.
Yet nobody made the CBO score public!
On the contrary, at that time, all we heard was a lot of RW nonsense about how the Boxer/Kerry bill would add $1,761 to household budgets, despite attempts to make public the truth in the CBO scores, that it would generate $21 billion a year! The cap and trade component in Boxer/Kerry would add funds to the treasury in order to pay for our rebates for solar panels and other renewable energy conversions.
But, back to the energy-only bill. How would the bill handle disbursement of the $48 billion budget for three years.
To disburse its measly $16 billion-odd a year; the "energy only" bill would add a new Federal Agency: the Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) to disburse these funds.
Currently, the Department of Energy is investing ten times that amount in renewable energy - $36 billion under ARRA in advanced technologies and renewable energy, led by the Nobel prizewinning Energy Secretary Steven Chu. However, Chu has been under fire from Republican members for supplying too little support for fossil and nuclear power.
Last year the DOE under Chu ably disbursed $36 billion in renewable energy funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and in the 2010 budget the administration hopes to keep funding at the current level for renewable energy. The idea that he could not be trusted to disburse a measly $3 billion is ridiculous.
The "energy-only" bill is co-sponsored by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (R) who led the attempt to overturn the recent EPA ruling on greenhouse gases, and it has strong Republican and Chamber of Commerce (remember the Yes Men mocking their fossil-funded position on climate change?) support.
The fossil funds in the "energy only" bill, S1462, come from you and me, and maintain the status quo.
Energy-Only Bill: Cost = $13 billion annually.
The renewable funds in CEJAPA are from fossil companies who must reduce pollution or pay pollution fees. It reduces greenhouse gases 20% by 2020, and generates an extra $21 billion each year from which renewable incentives are funded.
CEJAPA: Benefit = $21 billion annually.
I simply can't imagine why there has been a media blackout on this very stark difference in the CBO scores between the two bills, can you?
Image: mar is sea Y
Crossposted from CleanTechnica by original author Susan Kraemer